For those who answer to its higher calling, those road-to-Damascus moments when the majesty and power of rock ‘n’ roll are revealed in life-changing ways are burned into their brains for a lifetime.
Connor Kelly – the soulful-eyed frontman of Connor Kelly and the Time Warp whose pretty-boy looks and bashful charm are weaponized when he straps on a guitar and steps up to the microphone – remembers his well. He’d grown up around music; his father, Ben, was the drummer for the Knoxville-based cover trio The Woodies, and so it wasn’t as if the concept of guitars-bass-drums was a foreign one.
But what he was accustomed to sounded nothing like what he heard pouring out of the speakers of the family car pointed west on Interstate 40, headed to his cousin’s wedding in Nashville. He was 5 or 6 years old, he recalls, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” literally rearranged his brain.
“It was late at night when it came on, and I just remember hearing it and thinking, ‘You’re not allowed to do that,’” Kelly says, grinning on the other end of a Zoom interview with BLANK Newspaper. “It was just absurd, and it grabbed me. That outro especially, when he sounds so operatic? That just shook me to my core as a little kid.”
It’s ironic, in a sense, that such a revelation came on the drive to Nashville, a city to which so many aspiring musicians relocate in order to seek fame and fortune. It is, after all, built on the backbone of country’s legacy but has exploded in recent years as something of an all-genre mecca, a place where indie-rock bands like Diarrhea Planet and JEFF the Brotherhood have made their bones just as capably as industry insiders with billboards overlooking Music Row. And no doubt, Connor Kelly and the Time Warp might have an easier go of it if they were to pick up stakes and plant a flag there, given the prolific number of booking agents, publicists and others who make up the support structure that can be critical to a band’s success.
Except … Kelly and the guys – his brother Ben on guitar, bassist Aiden Lamb and drummer Daniel Ryan – aren’t a conventional rock ‘n’ roll band. The music they make isn’t, and their approach to “making it” doesn’t necessarily align with expectations, because, hell, Kelly himself is a high-school dropout who’s surrounded himself with individuals who nurture his devil-may-care attitude and hide-and-watch determination.
“When we first started booking shows, I was booking them myself, and I wanted to book us in places like New York and L.A., to just shoot for the moon – and that’s great! We love playing those places,” Kelly said. “But I started to realize that we could cover more ground and make more fans in places like Boone, North Carolina, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Burlington, Vermont, which have the most kick-ass music scenes. If you think about it, you can play New York City on a Friday night, but there may be 500 other shows going on at the same time.
“That’s what I love about Knoxville, and that’s what we want to continue to do in and for Knoxville. We’ve talked about one day opening up a 200-cap room kind of like the Pilot Light, just for those kinds of bands looking for a place to play. We love being a part of this scene, and we want to do something to help this scene, too. Knoxville is very close to our hearts, and wherever we travel to play, Knoxville always has this amazing, deep place in us, because there’s such a fantastic music scene here.”
And it’s one he’s no stranger to, although it took him finding his own lane as a musician to truly appreciate how rich, diverse and historic it truly is. After all, in addition to his pops on drums, The Woodies featured singer-songwriter Dave Landeo, a longtime Knoxville musician now living in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as Jeff Bowers and Harrison Forbes. They primarily played the fraternity house circuit, occasionally venturing out to venues like the long-gone Patrick Sullivan’s Saloon, but instruments were always around the house, and Kelly followed in his father’s footsteps by climbing on the drum stool as soon as he was old enough to hold a pair of sticks.
“I remember I would go in there as early as 5 years old, as early as I could to make noise without people being worried about it,” he said with grin. “It was always a hobby thing, though, and it wasn’t until I was 15 or 16 when I really started writing songs and singing and playing other instruments.”
Connor’s brother Ben started out on the banjo and used to busk at University of Tennessee tailgate parties down near Neyland Stadium, earning a few bucks (and on occasion, the clandestine Jell-O shot) as a teenager for his rendition of “Rocky Top.” After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles to live with the brothers’ older sister, Caroline, and Connor found himself drawn to the guitar.
“When I was younger, I shied away from that, because I didn’t feel super comfortable playing guitar until Ben left, and I had a quiet, safe space to be really bad!” he said.
By the time he hit high school, his interest in the competitiveness of sports waned, but his love of rock ‘n’ roll began to arc upward. He fell into a crowd of like-minded musicians, including singer-songwriter Devin Badgett, formerly of the hotshot bluegrass ensemble Subtle Clutch, who was a senior when Kelly was a freshman at the Webb School of Knoxville. Badgett, in fact, ran a school talent show called “Rock the Clock,” and Kelly – who by that point was playing drums as part of Badgett’s band – took notice.
“There were other people who weren’t as well-versed in music signing up for it, and I thought, ‘I can do that – this kid that sits next to me in biology class is going to do it, so why not?’” Kelly said. “I was also in the percussion section of the pep band at the time, so I got this dude who played the tuba to play bass for me, and a dude in the percussion section to play the banjo, and I played drums and sang. That was the first time I sang in front of people, and we did two cover songs.”
They called themselves The Stentorians (stentorian meaning “loud or powerful in sound,” especially pertaining to voice), and Kelly suddenly realized he had put together a band. Not content to only play covers, he dabbled in songwriting. One of his earliest compositions, “Things 2 Lose,” was personal and solid enough, he felt, that he sent it to his brother in Los Angeles. Ben added guitar tracks and sent it back, Connor threw it online, and before he knew it, the loping, languid rock song built on an R&B backbeat and filled with undeniable groove had been streamed roughly 40,000 times.
“I think that did it. I was already excited, and that made me overconfident in this childlike way, and I became so sure that music was do or die,” he said. “I didn’t really have time to think about how crazy it was that there was anybody listening to that, and I just thought, ‘Hell yeah, I guess I’m doing this, and I’m not going to school anymore!’”
Recognizing the potential in his little brother’s talent, Ben moved back to East Tennessee, and together the two set out to make a record. “Informal Conversations” was the end result, and to help make it, they recruited noted producer Travis Wyrick to mix it. In another serendipitous connection, Wyrick’s old hard rock band, Sage, frequently shared a bill with The Woodies back in the early 1990s, and the bass player for the “Conversations” sessions was noted low-end king Vince Ilagan, who also plays as part of The Lonetones – the band of Sean McCullough and Steph Gunnoe, the husband-wife team who also happen to be the parents of local indie rocker Willa McCullough, who performs as Willa Mae and is Kelly’s girlfriend.
“Informal Conversations” was released in 2018, around the same time Kelly dropped out of Webb to pursue music full-time. From the outset, the Kelly brothers – who wrote all of the songs on that first record – never doubted they’d make it to the next level, but they also set out to understand what, exactly, that level looked like, especially in a seemingly unconventional music town like Knoxville.
From the beginning, the guys threw themselves into a younger, vibrant scene that knocked on the doors of local venues and, if they wouldn’t open, made their own. He befriended Tyler Larrabee of the band Stonefish, who founded the New Ground Music Festival and now serves as manager of Connor Kelly and the Time Warp. Larrabee’s connections as a festival organizer helped the band connect with Atlas Touring, which recently put together a cross-country American tour.
Along the way, the guys began to hone in on a distinctive sound – which is to say, a smorgasbord of influences that reach back into the Pink Floyd past and forward into the Radiohead future for a trippy fusion of licks, beats, rhythms and power chords. It’s been a learning process, Kelly said, but the beauty of such constant evolution is that listeners have hitched their fandom wagons to the unpredictability of what Connor Kelly and the Time Warp might sound like from record to record.
Nowhere is that more evident than on the band’s second record, “Distant Forest.” They were in the middle of cutting it when COVID upended everything, and that forced the fellas to think harder on what they wanted to sound like.
“We got in a real studio, and there were some toys laying around that we didn’t know if we were supposed to touch them, but we did it anyway,” Kelly said. “When we made it, I was in what I say was my Frank Zappa era, just into the craziest stuff I couldn’t even listen to today. We were in a really good place of being in that era, just this great place to experiment and be weird, and we learned a lot from doing that.”
For the record, they recruited G. Maxwell Zemanovic as a session drummer. As a veteran of artists like Miranda Lambert and Mike Dillon, he leaned into the experimental aesthetic and helped push “Distant Forest” into even more adventurous sonic directions, Kelly said.
“He looks at the drums like it’s a whole different instrument. I remember for ‘Flying Cars,’ Ben wrote it as this strummy kind of folk song, and Max just kind of flipped it on its side and did this whole weird, in-the-pocket, Grateful-Dead thing to it,” Kelly said. “That record is just weird, and it was always going to be weird, because I think we needed to learn how to do that to develop some character and colors to the sound.
“It’s something that is ever-changing and is always shuffling itself around, presenting in different ways that we have to figure out how to navigate. It’s the most enchanting thing in my life and also the bane of my existence, because yes, we found a way to become a certain way and have a certain sound, but there’s a lot of room for changes and fluctuations and taking shape, and I personally love that.”
Right now, he added, the third record is in the planning stages. The guys are talking about what worked best for the first two and figuring out how best to capture whatever vibe comes next. Everything is up in the air – they’re considering a cabin rental in Townsend as a recording space, for example – except for a single certainty: It won’t sound anything like “Informal Conversations” or “Distant Forest.”
They’ve been there, done that. And there are new territories to explore and new lands to conquer. Europe, for instance: They’re headed overseas in 2024, on a jaunt put together by Rola Music, after a final 2023 Knoxville date on New Year’s Eve at Scruffy City Hall – the proprietor of which (Scott West) was one of the first club owners to take a chance on the band, according to Kelly.
They’ve kept an intentionally low profile in the city they love, both to keep from saturating the market and to focus on other towns, and with a desire to have a new record ready to release by next March in order to have new merch on their European tour, they’ll likely keep it that way. And all this comes off of the heels of opening spots for the likes of The Backseat Lovers and Moon Taxi.
Being asked to play Waynestock in early 2023 after the festival’s two-year pandemic pause was an honor, Kelly added – and not just because he and the boys were on the bill. They went on right before Neowizard, one of the projects fronted by longtime Knox shock rocker Rus Harper, and the opportunity to crowd the stage and watch a master work his magic was as educational as it was entertaining, Kelly said. He was equally spellbound about the opportunity to play the same stage as a reunited Superdrag at Second Bell in 2022.
Those two things, he added, are just examples of what makes Knoxville special … and why it’ll always be the city that Connor Kelly and the Time Warp call home.
“We talk about going to a city like Nashville every other day – but it’s always talked about with an eye roll,” Kelly said. “There are things that happen over there that you can really benefit from business-wise, but my goal as an artist, and our goal as a band, has always been to do something to represent Knoxville.”
wildsmith@blanknews.com
